Trump announces ground strikes against drug traffickers across Latin America
14 December 00:21
The U.S. Army will begin conducting ground strikes against drug trafficking targets across Latin America, President Donald Trump has announced.
“We’ve stopped 96% of the supply of drugs by water and now we’re starting [similar actions to supply] by land. It’s much easier to do it [drug delivery] by land, and it [ground strikes] will start happening,” Bloomberg quoted Trump as saying, according to "Komersant Ukrainian".
At the same time, he refused to provide details about when and where the escalation of his military campaign, which initially targeted Venezuelan ships that Washington claimed were transporting drugs to the United States, would begin.
Prior to that, the president warned that the United States would strike ground targets in Venezuela. Trump’s statements were seen as a campaign to put pressure on President Nicolas Maduro, who was put on a reward for his capture, but now he insists that targeted attacks could affect other countries in the region.
“It doesn’t have to be in Venezuela,” Trump said at the briefing, adding that “people who bring drugs into our country are targets.” According to the head of the White House, if deaths from drug overdoses were taken into account in the same way as combat losses at the front, it would be “a war that has no analogues.”
Since the beginning of September, the US military has been waging a military campaign against drug trafficking ships in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean on Trump’s orders. The strikes have killed dozens of people. Some of the survivors were deported to Latin America after being rescued from the water.
on November 29, Trump announced the closure of the skies over Venezuela, to whose shores a strike group of the US Navy, including the USS Gerald R. Ford. The United States also began seizing sanctioned tankers off the coast of Venezuela.
Strikes on ground targets in the region would mean a serious escalation of this campaign. This week, Maduro said that if his country is attacked, the working class should organize a general strike and seek an even more radical revolution.
